SOMEWHERE BEAUTIFUL BETWEEN NEW YORK AND SEATTLE — America, we need to talk. And not on Facebook. I mean, really talk. I’ll have many thoughts to share from this summer’s cross-country road trip (#RoadTrip201^), but one is screaming at me so loud I have to spit it out immediately. While [Keep reading]
Baseball has long celebrated cheating, but electronic cheating just sent a former team front-office worker to prison for nearly four years. Former St. Louis Cardinals scouting director Chris Correa, who earlier pled guilty to using old passwords to access a former team’s scouting database, was sentenced to 46 months in jail on Monday. Correa broke [Keep reading]
There’s been a scary increase in successful ransomware attacks against large organizations this year. Specifically, hospitals have found themselves at the mercy of hackers who demand ransom payments to unlock critical system files. Recently, there have been signs that these criminals have moved on to universities, too. The University of Calgary [Keep reading]
WASHINGTON D.C. — Here are my prepared remarks from this Wednesday’s Consumer Federation of America awards banquet. There is no video, so I’ve matched an audio file with a few images. I’m sorry the audio isn’t great — it’s from Michael Shreiber’s iPhone — so if it’s too hard to hear, [Keep reading]
Quantrey Bryant wasn’t a suspected terrorist, but he was a convicted felon, and felons aren’t supposed to be able to buy guns. But from an Alabama jail cell, using smuggled cell phones, stolen credit card data, online websites, and straw buyers, Bryant was able to set up a guns-for-money crime [Keep reading]
In the days when there were newspapers, every cub reporter’s first job was to go to the local police station and mine stacks of police reports looking for good stories. In my first job, as is common, a desk sergeant sat with me once a week and sifted reports for [Keep reading]
How bad has the ransomware problem become? The state auditor of Ohio held a press conference yesterday because local government agencies keep falling for ransomware attacks. And a firm that tracks domain activity found a 3,500% increase in ransomware-related domain name registrations in the past quarter. Hacker love to cut and [Keep reading]
Tell the truth: when people say “lifetime service awards,” you think “retirement.” So it is with mixed feelings that I share with you I will be honored with one on Wednesday. The Consumer Federation of America, which represents 300 non-profit consumer organizations around the country, will be presenting me with the [Keep reading]
Those new chip-enabled credit cards are working, says Visa: counterfeit card fraud dropped 26 percent in a year at merchants set up to accept the cards, Visa told me this week. You didn’t think criminals would stand still, did you? In a mad dash to squeeze every last dollar out [Keep reading]
A billion useless people. No, maybe that’s generous. Billions, thanks to robots and artificial intelligence. The “rise of the useless class.” The end of work. And with it, the end of pay. There are the things that the world’s biggest thinkers are thinking about right now. It’s frightening how little [Keep reading]
Bob Sullivan